Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday November 23, 2012 @03:01AM
from the hands-off dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Today, the European Parliament passed a resolution that condemns the upcoming attempt from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to assert control over the Internet, and instructed its 27 Member States to act accordingly. This follows an attempt from the ITU to assert itself as the governing body and control the Internet. From the article: 'The resolution, which was passed with a large majority, included Members of European Parliament (MEPs) from all major party groups, and the Pirate Party’s Amelia Andersdotter had been playing a central role in its drafting, together with MEPs Marietje Schaake and Judith Sargentini from the Netherlands, Sabine Verheyen and Petra Kammerevert from Germany, Ivailo Kalfin from Bulgaria, and Catherine Trautmann from France.'"

Anonymous Douche fails to understand GP's points. An open internet would prohibit and prevent the abominations of "justice" that have been perpetrated on Kim Dotcom and on Wikileaks. The United States has gone out of it's way repeatedly to prevent an open internet. ACTA and NPP are two fine examples of that. In effect, both are government blessings on corporate attempts to strangle the internet.

An open internet would prohibit and prevent the abominations of "justice" that have been perpetrated on Kim Dotcom and on Wikileaks

I don't think so. "Open" does not imply anarchic, nor does it reach beyond the virtual borders of the Internet. Visa and Mastercard would still have blocked payments to WikiLeaks, Amazon would still have kicked WL of their S3 network and New Zealand's police would still have raided Dotcom's home.

None of those events have anything to do with the openness of the Internet. If anything, the likelihood of those events is larger with an open Internet because with a regulated Internet the MAFIAA c.s. would have had more opportunities to intervene.

Despite the US still being conservative compared to the progessive world, it is definetly far more liberal than nations such as Saudi Arabia where everyone citizen has to belong to the state sanctioned religion and women barely get by with showing their faces in public. Sure the current situation isn't ideal, but the ITU's solution is far worse.

Despite the ludicrous summary, the actual wording of that part was was:

[The European Parliament] calls on the Member States to prevent any changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations which would be harmful to the openness of the internet, net neutrality, the end-to-end principle, universal service obligations, and the participatory governance entrusted to multiple actors such as governments, supranational institutions, non-governmental organisations, large and small businesses, the technological community and internet users and consumers at large

These aren't things that would change if the US didn't hold the keys to the internet.

The control of the internet lands on one organization: IANA. Right now, IANA delegates its powers to ICANN. IANA is merely responsible for deciding who gets what IP addresses and domain names. The ITU wants to usurp that power for themselves, for who knows what ends, or why they think the status quo is wrong.

In any case, even if say the ITU, the EU, China, or even nobody at all had the keys to IANA, the US would still be able to go after Dotcom and Wikileaks due to pre-existing treaties and strong arming tactics that don't require the internet to even exist in the first place.

Regardless though, there is no such thing as an "open internet" in your definition of the term. SOMEBODY has to decide who gets what names and numbers. There are theoretical ways of decentralizing DNS, (which in my opinion will be riddled with problems, although it will at least perform the intended function) but you CAN NOT decentralize IP address assignments without introducing a whole mess of other problems. It would be akin to not having a regulatory authority on who gets licenses to any given RF spectrum.

In my opinion, the US isn't conservative, more like individualistic. Yes, there are religious loudmouths, but they aren't common, you just hear about them more because they are loud where the others are not. Most people, republican or democrat, have religious views on the back of their mind but don't proselytize them. Except, of course, politicians like Jesse Jackson Jr. or Rick Santorum.

Conservatives say ban sex from the internet. Progressives say ban anything that somebody might consider offensive, even going so far as to put harmless internet trolls in jail. Individualists say that if you don't like what you see, change the channel.

The US, by and large, is the later of the three. We don't ban pornography, and we don't have hate speech laws. Freedom of speech is more absolute here than anywhere else, pretty much the only limit is speech that causes physical harm.

Though the left likes to claim that deregulation and austerity is conservative, and so does the media at large, it isn't. It is very much libertarian.

To be honest, while I don't like the ITU either I think we shouldn't give our support to the US for free. We should try to exploit our leverage in this situation and tell the Americans that if they want us to support them keeping their 'net they have to govern it more responsibly. Particularly the area of gTLDs is one where there's lots of room for improvement, and Europe shouldn't give up its bargaining positions for free.